Friday, August 29, 2014

This novel by Jim Laughter (2011) is mostly forgettable, but at least it may be a start for a new genre.

They say that Americans spend almost three hours per day watching TV, which seems to be the world record. That means that a large fraction of their time while awake is spent into a fictional universe which has little to do with reality (that includes most of what is referred to as "news"). That may be the reason why Americans are the least concerned in the world about the threat of climate change. Apparently, fiction easily trumps reality, at least as long as the hurricane doesn't flood your house or the forest fire vaporizes it.

Apart from extreme cases, indeed, fighting fiction with reality is a hopeless task. Scientists know (or should know) this very well. For decades, they have been trying to convince the public that climate change is a serious problem and they have been doing that by writing incomprehensible papers that nobody even tries to read. No wonder that they had no success facing the fossil fuel lobby, which, instead, as been spinning one fancy tale after another; from the "hide the decline" conspiracy, to the "you forgot to take into account water vapor" accusation. Unless the public is hit hard by the consequence of climate change, they will always prefer a fancy tale to hard facts. And, even then, when reality strikes in the form of the various climate related disasters, they have other priorities rather than worrying about reducing their carbon footprint.

So, it seems that in the clash of fantasy and reality, reality usually succumbs, at least in the short run. Then, can we fight fiction with fiction? Could we transform climate change in a tale? Can we spur action on the basis of a tale? In principle, it should not be impossible: people act on the basis of their worldview and this worldview is normally largely based on narrative; just think about the current predominant vision, the one that says that liberism and the free market will solve all problems. Is it based on hard facts? Not at all, it is pure fiction.

So, a number of attempts at a new literary genre that goes under the name of "Climate Fiction", or "cli-fi" may explore the concept that dramatizing climate change could make it understandable to normal people. Does it work? Well, so far the attempts seen in this field have been less than memorable. One example comes to mind; "the day after tomorrow" of which it was said that "This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery." In terms of Cli-Fi novels, we seem to be gearing up for something interesting but, so far, the list of recent ones is very short and not especially impressive.

A cli-fi novel that I read recently is "Polar City Red", by Jim Laughter, published in 2009 by Deadly Niche Press. As a novel, it is, ahem.... let's say that it is not among the best novels I can think of. It starts from a reasonable - although not very original - premise; the idea that governments secretly created "polar colored cities" (of
which the one of the title is the "Red" one) where a small number of
people were to take refuge to escape the disaster created by global
warming. But the development of the story is all based on cardboard characters and on a plot which goes nowhere and which has holes as big as a Siberian methane crater. If we really want to find something nice about this novel, let's say that if it is to be a start of a new genre, it is not really worse than the pulp fiction of the 1930s, which gave rise to what was later called "science fiction." After all, you have to start from somewhere!

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

For those of us who have lived the whole cycle of the UFO phenomenon, I highly recommend "The UFO phenomenon" a book by John Greer, "The Archdruid". The book is also summarized in a post of his.

Greer is a lucid thinker, an excellent analyst, and his knowledge is truly encyclopedic. The result is a book that, as it could have been expected (and as he himself describes) "managed the not inconsiderable feat of
offending both sides of the UFO controversy. It did so by the simple expedient
of setting aside the folk mythology that’s been heaped up with equal enthusiasm
by true believers in extraterrestrial visitation and true believers in today’s
fashionable pseudoskepticaldebunkery."

It is not often that a book can change one's worldview, but this one did that for me on several points. Greer is completely right in noting that the UFO phenomenon - as others - have given rise to a wave of "pseudoskepticaldebunkery." The concept is that often scientifically minded people have gone too far in their criticism of anything that appears to be outside what we consider the realms of science.

One of the problems considered by Greer is disinformation, that is the willful distortion and misrepresentation of
the data. It is something that plays an important role every time we
move away from phenomena which can be comfortably reproduced in a
laboratory. But scientists have usually no training and no experience in
recognizing disinformation and dealing with it. They just tend to ignore it, and are easy victims of its effects. On this point, the discussion in Greer's book is
excellent and brings overwhelming support to his conclusion that the UFO
phenomenon is mainly the result of disinformation created by the US
military.

Another point raised by Greer is how the debate on UFOs has been framed using different views on how to obtain knowledge (if you like, it is an epistemological problem). Believers in the extraterrestrial origins of UFO have been using rhetorical methods, debunkers have been using the scientific method. Greer correctly notes that there is an abyss of difference in the two methods. Science tries to verify a theory by falsifying it and just one experiment that goes against the theory will destroy it. Rhetoric attempts to buttress a theory by piling up positive results and neglecting negative ones. When we get to debating UFOs, debunkers are at a definite disadvantage as they have to prove that all sightings are illusions, or hoaxes, or known flying objects. It can't work.

So, if someone says that he has seen strange
lights in the sky, it is silly to feel that a scientist's duty is
to automatically dismiss that by saying that it was just the planet Venus or something
like that. That doesn't mean that we have to cede to the tsunami of pseudoscience diffusing all over the infosphere, but science will lose credibility if it continues operating in the "automatic debunking mode". (See, for instance, this post by Paula). And if science loses credibility, it will become more and more difficult to demolish even clearly flawed claims, for instance about low temperature nuclear fusion.

The epistemological problems that Greer raises is profound and important. Suppose that there existed alien intelligences, and that it were possible to contact them, would the scientific method be suitable to study them? Hardly so, at least beyond a trivial level. Even studying the behavior of our own species - which we know to exist - turns out to be extremely difficult and easily affected by disinformation campaigns, as it has happened to "The Limits to Growth" study in 1972 and is happening now for climate science.

Modern science was born to study the motion of planets and to solve all kinds of mechanical problems. But, in time,
we have been discovering how complex the universe is. Think just about this: we have good models telling us how human activity is changing the climate. But we have no good models telling us howto convince humankind that it is crucial to stop doing the things that create climate change. Clearly, we are missing something and something very important, which the scientific method can hardly deal with. The story of the UFO phenomenon is a reminder that we need - as always - to go beyond the old paradigms.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Peak UFO: Results of a query for "unidentified flying objects" in the JSTOR database, a collection of scientific journals. The number of articles mentioning the "UFO" concept is an indication of the scientific interest in the field. It peaked in the late 1960s and declined afterward.

When I came to age, in the early 1970s, the concept of UFO, unidentified flying object, was well entrenched in the worldview of the time. A worldview that included science fiction, space exploration, and UFOs together; a triad of different facets of the same idea: that space was the "new frontier" as President Kennedy said in 1960s, or the "final frontier" as it was repeated at the start of every episode of the first series of "Star Trek".

Time has passed, and the frontier has turned out to be too difficult to reach. After the moment of enthusiasm of the post-war years, space exploration turned out to be too expensive for a society which started to be burdened by the growing costs of mineral depletion and of pollution. With the final frontier becoming more and more remote, science fiction abandoned the genre of space conquest, moving toward epic fantasy and pseudo-medieval settings. And UFOs seemed to recede below the threshold of consciousness of the media.

But did UFOs really disappear? This summer, following a suggestion by "Corvide", I went back to this arm of the space triad of the 1960 and I read two books. One is "The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation" by John Michael Greer (AKA, the Archdruid), the other "UFOs for the 21st century mind", by Richard M. Dolan.

Both are recent books which attempt to evaluate the whole UFO cycle from its beginnings, that we may take as the late 1940s (even though the phenomenon is much older). Of the two, Greer's book is by far the better. Greer is skeptical about UFOs intended as manifestations of extraterrestrial entities, but the most fascinating part of his study is not so much about that. It is the part dedicated to how the UFO story was the origin and the test bed of the disinformation techniques which were then extensively used over and over, in particular by the US intelligence. Greer's book deserves a complete discussion which I'll try to tackle in a future post. Here, instead, I'll give space to Dolan's book which is also fascinating, but for completely different reasons.

About "UFOs for the 21st century mind" let me say that if there ever was an example of the concept of "beating around the bush" this is it. The book goes on for almost 500 pages (472 to be exact) of case after case of people claiming the strangest things seen in the sky or on the ground, but never the author feels the need to define what we are talking about. What does Mr. Dolan think UFOs are? To find some kind of an answer, we must go to chapter 10, where we find, buried in the mass of the book, a mere 29 pages of discussion on this fundamental question. And a very unsatisfactory discussion it is: we are told of the Hollywood-style features of the "Grays" and of weird speculations such as the fact that these creatures might be working on a long term breeding program for the creation of human-alien hybrids (p. 379).

The fascination with Dolan's book lies all there: in this startling contrast between a large number of claims that there is "something" up there and the extreme poverty of the interpretations of what this "something" could be. It doesn't help that Mr. Dolan thinks that we are victims of a conspiracy which has the government hiding the truth from us; the book has a distinct feeling of being badly outdated. Reading it feels like reading a science fiction story of the 1950s, with its space heroes yielding blaster guns against the alien invaders. Is it possible that in more than half century of discussing UFOs we haven't progressed even just a bit, with the "Grays" of today replacing the "little green men" of the 1950s? But that seems to be where we stand.

Not that it is a fault of Dolan, nor of other UFO researchers. The problem may simply be impossible to deal with, even worse than that of the P vs. NP in mathematics. Let me explain: it is perfectly possible that there exist other civilizations, somewhere, and that these civilizations could be technologically much more advanced than ours. I also have no objections to the concept that these civilizations could be neighboring us in ways that we cannot understand at present and being in contact with us occasionally, or even frequently.

Once this is stated, however, how do we proceed? So far, the most complex thing we know is the human brain and human brains have at least a fighting chance to study other, similar, brains. But what about something more complex (and perhaps much more complex)? We have at least one example of a high-tech civilization coming in contact with a low tech one. It was in the years during and after World War II, when the Melanesian islanders observed the arrival of the US army (and earlier on, of the Japanese army). The islanders were not stupid, but they totally misunderstood the meaning of what they were seeing. The result was the phenomenon that we know today as "Cargo Cult".

Then, consider what could happen if the difference in complexity and technological level were much higher. Imagine yourself as a honeybee: would you be able to understand that your hive was built by human beings for their purposes? Would you be able to even perceive the existence of human beings? You see what the problem is. So far, the study of entities more intelligent and more powerful than us has been reserved to the field we call "theology" which starts from assumption not exactly compatible with the scientific method as we know it nowadays.

This is the big problem with UFOs, probably an unsolvable one. Listing thousands (or even tens of thousands) of cases of "mysterious things flying above" (or landing from said above) is not useful. We are just accumulating a sort of "bestiary" of aliens, a compendium of the kind popular during the Middle Ages. But we are not progressing in the biology or the ecology of aliens. We don't even know if what we are seeing is real, although deformed by our limited capabilities of perception and understanding, or is an illusion, vanitas vanitatum, like the dragons and the sea serpents of medieval bestiaries.

In the end, it seems that the UFO phenomenon was the result of the culture of the times when it was born. A result of the optimism of the post-war years and of the diffusion of the concept of space as the new (or final) frontier. Once that concept started to vanish from our cultural horizon, the same destiny befell on the UFO phenomenon.

Is it over, then? Are we really alone and we have just been dreaming of more powerful entities visiting us (and, perhaps, benevolent and merciful entities?). The absence of evidence is no evidence of absence, especially if we don't know what exactly should the "evidence" be. So, there may well be, out there, higher patterns that we can't understand but that we may dimly perceive. It has been said that now we see darkly, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. And, who knows? The only unsurprising thing about the future is that it is always full of surprises.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

A poster in favor of the bear named Daniza, under threat of capture or suppression in Italy. It says "Leave alone Daniza and her cubs, otherwise I'll never come back to Trentino" (Trentino is the Northern region of Italy where the story is unfolding). Killing and destroying everything which is not under direct human control is the origin of the disaster called "overshoot". As long as people will not realize that there are limits to the human appropriation of resources on this planet, nothing will change.

If you like to show your support for Daniza and her cubs put your "like" on the Facebook page titled "Io sto con Daniza" (I am with Daniza)

The recent story of the bear called "Daniza" is typical of many stories of this kind. A few days ago, someone went looking for mushrooms in the woods of the Trentino region in Italy and stumbled onto this female bear and her two cubs. He wasn't smart enough to leave the place at the fastest possible speed, as he himself reported later. The alarmed bear decided to teach him a little lesson which, fortunately, left him almost unscathed, rather than consigning him to the records of the Darwin awards. Mother Daniza, apparently, limited herself to chasing the intruder away rather than using all her force against him, as she could have decided to do.

The result: cries of "shoot the bear!". Immediately after the incident, local politicians and local newspapers all seemed to agree on the need of killing Daniza. After a considerable reaction against this idea on the Web, the local government limited the proposed action to capturing the bear; which would probably condemn to death her two cubs. As I am writing, they are still trying to capture Daniza but, so far, she has managed to remain free with her cubs.

Despite the number of people expressing themselves in favor of Daniza and her two cubs, there remains the fact of this immediate and commonplace reaction: wilderness is a problem, wild animals are dangerous. Let's eliminate them and everything will be fine. Which is, after all, the way we tend to try to solve most problems:
shoot or bomb the source of the trouble until (hopefully) the problem will disappear.

This attitude is widespread and it is, after all, the main reason for the phenomenon we call overshoot. Recognizing no limits to their action, humans want to appropriate every possible resource of the planetary ecosystem. Whatever opposes this action is ruthlessly eliminated. They don't realize that they are dependent on the ecosystem, rather than the reverse. So, the over-appropriation of the natural resources depletes them to the point that they can't reform fast enough to replace the losses. The result has a name: collapse. Killing Daniza the bear and her cub won't cause the world's economy to collapse, but it is an indication of an attitude which is leading us exactly there.

Here is a telling graph by xkcd showing how little wilderness has remained in the world. And we keep destroying it.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Italy's "Energy Efficiency" plotted as a ratio of the GDP (constant dollars) to the energy consumption (data from the World Bank)

There is an old story in Italy (but also in other Mediterranean regions) that tells of a man who tried to train his donkey to work without food. So, he gradually reduced the beast's daily ration of hay. Later on, the man reported that, unfortunately, the donkey had died just when it had learned to go without any food at all.

The man of the story must have been an economist. He was trying to optimize the system and he had defined the "efficiency" of the donkey as the ratio of the work performed divided by the amount of hay consumed. He had found that reducing the amount of hay improved efficiency and, with impeccable logic, had brought the idea to its natural conclusion.

Something similar seems to be taking place with the economy of whole countries. Economists define as "efficiency" the ratio of the GDP produced per unit of energy consumed. Noting that this ratio has been increasing for many Western economies during the past decades, they conclude that economies are becoming more and more efficient. They even speak of "decoupling", noting that the GDP can keep increasing while the energy consumption remains constant - or decreases. This is supposed to be a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately, the problems with this optimistic interpretation appear stark clear with the case of Italy. Notice, in the graph above, how this "efficiency" shot up just when the Italian economy started to collapse, with a decline in GDP, loss of more than 25% of the Italian industrial production, massive increase in unemployment and all the related disasters. (See here, and here for reports about the post-peak Italian economy)

The increase in efficiency shown by the graph is a pure illusion. The Italian economy is not becoming more efficient but, simply, contracting. Industries are closing down and people become unemployed. As a consequence, less energy is consumed in manufacturing and for transportation. At the same time, other elements of the economic system, say, rents or property taxes, remain relatively unaffected; government spending, for instance, tends to go up. Hence, the GDP doesn't decrease as fast as energy consumption and the ratio of the two increases (*). Obviously, that's nothing to be happy about.

Concepts such as "efficiency" and "decoupling" seem to be based on highly aggregated parameters; too much to provide a useful interpretation of what's happening in a country's economy. That doesn't mean that the economy cannot get more efficient with time, just as a donkey may learn to work even with a reduced hay reaction. But, without energy, and especially without cheap and abundant energy, an economy simply starves and, eventually, it suffers the fate of the donkey of the story.

(*) The increase in the GDP/energy consumption ratio can be simulated by a dynamic model and it can be shown that it is just an effect of the time lag in the process of transformation of natural resources into capital. But that will take another post to explain.

Solar power has won the global argument. Photovoltaic energy is already so
cheap that it competes with oil, diesel and liquefied natural gas in much of
Asia without subsidies.

Roughly 29pc of electricity capacity added in America last year came from
solar, rising to 100pc even in Massachusetts and Vermont. "More solar
has been installed in the US in the past 18 months than in 30 years,"
says the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). California's subsidy
pot is drying up but new solar has hardly missed a beat.

The technology is improving so fast - helped by the US military - that it has
achieved a virtous circle. Michael Parker and Flora Chang, at Sanford
Bernstein, say we entering a new order of "global energy deflation"
that must ineluctably erode the viability of oil, gas and the fossil fuel
nexus over time. In the 1980s solar development was stopped in its tracks by
the slump in oil prices. By now it has surely crossed the threshold
irreversibly.

The ratchet effect of energy deflation may be imperceptible at first since
solar makes up just 0.17pc of the world's $5 trillion energy market, or 3pc
of its electricity. The trend does not preclude cyclical oil booms along the
way. Nor does it obviate the need for shale fracking as a stop-gap, for
national security reasons or in Britain's case to curb a shocking current
account deficit of 5.4pc of GDP.

But the technology momentum goes only one way. "Eventually solar will
become so large that there will be consequences everywhere," they said.
This remarkable overthrow of everthing we take for granted in world energy
politics may occur within "the better part of a decade".

If the hypothesis is broadly correct, solar will slowly squeeze the revenues
of petro-rentier regimes in Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, among
others. Many already need oil prices near $100 a barrel to cover their
welfare budgets and military spending. They will have to find a new business
model, or fade into decline.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

This graph, from "economonitor," is very interesting because it contains so much relevant information. (However, note one detail: the title of the graph, "Miles Driven" is somewhat misleading; it should be "mileage", as the text of the post clearly says.) The relation of mileage to hourly wages is a parameter worth examining because it tells us a lot about the "systemic" efficiency of road transportation. What kind of efficiency can we actually afford?

Now, the graph shows a clear "peak mileage" which occurred around the year 2000, when Americas could afford the highest mileage from their cars in history. It was an efficiency peak of the road transportation system. But then, this efficiency diminished. How can we explain that?

The data of the graph depend on three factors 1) the cost of gasoline, 2) the average hourly wage, and 3) the average mileage of cars. Let see first the behavior of oil prices, which determine gasoline prices.

You see how oil prices spiked twice during the past 50 years, with the first and the second (ongoing) oil shocks. Amazingly, after the start of the first oil
crisis, the mileage per hour worked increased,
despite the steep price increases. But the opposite took place with the
second oil crisis, mileage per hour worked rapidly decreased. Something must have compensated the price increase during the first crisis, but that is not occurring during the second. Why?

Of the other two parameters involved in the mileage curve, hourly wages play only a minor role. In real terms, wages have remained more or less constant in the US since the early 1970s, as you can see in this graph (source: income inequality)

What changed a lot in this period is the technology of cars. The first oil shock in the 1970s was, indeed, a shock. People reacted by actively seeking for technological solutions which would increase the mileage of their cars. And these solutions were easy to find: simply reducing the size and the weight of the monster gas guzzlers of the 1960s did the job. Look at these data (source):

You see how quickly mileage increased throughout the 1970s - it nearly doubled in less than 10 years! And you can see how quickly people forgot about the oil problem once prices collapsed in the second half of the 1980s. The graph also shows that, with the second oil crisis, mileage restarted to increase, but by far not as fast as in the 1970s. There is a reason: it is difficult to optimize something already optimized. This we call 'diminishing returns of technological progress."

In the end, it looks like the "peak mileage" of the late 1990s is the real one. In the future, the a combination of factors which led to the peak will never return. Oil depletion is destined to make oil less and less affordable, even though market oscillations may hide this phenomenon. Wages are unlikely to grow in real terms after having been static for the past 40 years. And technological miracles are unlikely. Even the Toyota
Prius, technological marvel of our times, can only bring us back to where we were 15 years ago in terms of mileage per hour worked. As long as we remain within the paradigm of "road vehicle powered by a combustion engine" we have reached the limit of what we can do.

The result of the reduced overall efficiency of transportation we can see in this last graph (fromadvisorperspectives). In the US; people are driving less. Perhaps there are behavioral factors involved, but "peak mileage" suggest that they are doing that because they can't afford to drive more.

Monday, August 11, 2014

We are seeing scientists badly failing in convincing decision makers of the urgent need of doing something against the impending disaster caused by global warming. But that's just a symptom of the decline of scientific research, desperately seeking for funds, but oppressed by bureaucracy and by a general disinterest on the part of the public; to say nothing of the rampant phenomenon of pseudoscience. In this text, I argue that one of the causes of the decline of science is the emphasis in publishing (the "publish or perish" rule). I argue that scientific papers have become a form of currency, suffering all the problems which plague the modern financial markets. Both the financial world and the scientific world have developed "emergent" properties which optimize throughput but not necessarily benefits. In short, we are publishing too much. (image above from this page)

The scientific world seems to be swamped by a true tsunami of papers of all kinds, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. A situation which looks more and more similar to that of the general cacophony of the World Wide Web, swamped by poor quality information drowning the good information (if any). This starts to be a serious problem and some have explicitly asked that scientists should publish a smaller number of papers, but of higher quality (as argued, for instance, by Timo Hannay).

But why do we find ourselves in this situation? What has caused science to become a paper mill? Here, I argue that it is the result of the basic properties of complex systems. These systems generate emergent properties which are often similar in fields which appear very different at first sight. In particular, scientific publishing turns out to be very similar to the world's financial system, with all the associated problems of uncontrolled growth and waste of resources. Let me explain my point.

From the beginning of one's career, scientists are pressured to publish, publish, and publish. That is known as the "Publish or Perish" rule which is implemented by means of the "peer review" process in which colleagues of the authors have the authority of accepting or rejecting the submitted paper, or request modifications. It looks simple, but it is much more complex than this, with several variants on the theme of "peer review", different prestige of scientific journals, different methods of diffusion (e.g. open access or paid subscriptions) and more.

One of the problems with the system is that the peer review system can usually filter out the really bad papers, but can hardly do the same for papers which are simply mediocre. The limitations of peer review have generated the arcane (and ineffectual) methods of post-publication evaluation whichsometimes go under the name of "scientometry" or "scientometrics" (not to be confused with Scientology!!).

For a non-scientist, the urge to publish and the methods of publications in science are hard to understand, but the matter will appear perfectly clear if we compare it to something we are all familiar with: ordinary, monetary currency. Let me examine the many parallels in a non-exhaustive list.

1. Currency. The way we intend monetary currency nowadays is something that has no intrinsic value: it is in the form of sheets of paper or bits in computers. But by having these bits or pieces of paper you gain prestige and luxury items, and you climb up in the social ladder. The situation is exactly the same for scientific papers. In themselves, papers may have little or no value, but the more papers a scientist has published, the higher is his/her prestige and the more he/she can climb up the scientific ladder to higher and more prestigious positions. Papers can also bring luxury items in the form of expensive research equipment (microscopes, particle accelerators, scanners, etc.).

1. Emitting currency. Today, central banks are the entities authorized to emit monetary currency, and they have the authority of stamping a validation mark on an otherwise worthless piece of paper which then becomes 'money'. In science, validation of a paper is the privilege of scientific publishers. But who gave to scientific publishers this authority? It is an interesting question, just as impossible to answer as asking who gave the banks the same kind of authority with ordinary currency.

2. Spending your currency. Ordinary currency has no value in itself, but it can be exchanged with all sorts of items in the market. Scientific papers are not so easy to redeem, but can be transformed into ordinary currency by using them as tokens necessary to obtain a salary, career advancements, honorariums, and more.

3. Inflation. Currency is well known to undergo inflation; it loses
part of its value with time. Scientific papers are subjected to the same
phenomenon. Older papers are less valuable than new ones and in order to
maintain your "wealth", as a scientist you must fight inflation. If your papers get old and no new ones are
published, then they will be worth nothing.

4. Interest on currency. Ordinary currency can be deposited in banks in order to acquire an interest in the form of more currency. For scientific papers, the same role is played by funding agencies which transform scientific papers into research grants, which scientists will use to produce more papers. It is a classic example of a reinforcing feedback.

5. Assaying. The real value of ordinary currency can be ascertained by procedures which may involve chemical assaying of precious metals. With paper currency, there are ways to determine whether they have been printed by authorized agencies. With scientific papers, their validity is verified by "referees;" scientists who will decide whether the data and the interpretation reported are correct.

6. Counterfeiting. Ordinary currency can be counterfeited in various ways, for instance in the form of worthless metals instead of precious ones, in the form of paper bills printed by unauthorized agencies, and in the form of legitimate - but worthless - currency emitted by the central bank of small and unknown countries. In scientific publishing, counterfeiting is performed by small "predatory" publishers which do not perform the same validity check as the established publishers and may simply publish anything in exchange for a (standard monetary) fee paid by the authors.

7. Bad money replaces the good. This is a well known phenomenon in all economies, with money being debased by reducing the content of precious metals or printing too much of it. In science, we are seeing the same phenomenon with the proliferation of scientific publishers - often shady businesses trying to make a buck from scientists eager to see their paper published but not succeeding with the traditional journals. The result is an inflation of bad papers which tend to swamp the flux of good ones.

8. Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing. A Ponzi scheme is a pyramidal structure in which the lower layers pay the higher ones for the privilege of being inside. A multi-level marketing scheme is similar, but you pay for the privilege of being able to sell a product. There is no reason why such schemes cannot exist also in science. Some recently started journals have taken up a pyramidal structure which looks suspiciously like a multi-layer marketing scheme. In this case, scientists are drawn into the scheme with the allure of being defined as "editors." As a result, they work for free for the publisher!

As you see, the similarities are so many and so evident that we can say that the paper publishing system in modern science is a form of currency which exists and prospers within the system which has created it. It is so entrenched and so natural that most scientists seem to show little or no interest in its origins. Yet, the peer review system seems to have been unknown a century ago (see, e.g. this note by Michael Nielsen). For instance, only one of the about 300 papers published by Albert Einsten went through peer review. The scientific publication system we know today seems to have become the rule only in the second half of the 20th century. It is impressive that this system emerged all by itself without anyone
planning it. It is an "emergent phenomenon", one of the characteristics
of complex systems which tend to evolve in such a way to maximize the dissipation of potential energy (see, e.g. Kaila and Annila).

We could say that the world's financial system has evolved in order to maximize the destruction of the Earth's natural resources; favoring their consumption at speeds much larger than the Earth's capability to reform them - obviously not a benefit for humankind. We could argue that the world's scientific publication system has evolved in order to maximize the production of a large number of mediocre and useless paper. Again, this is not a benefit to science. Scientists are publishing too much!

Can these systems be changed? There is much talk on the subject of reforming the world's financial system, just as there is much talk about reforming the world's scientific publication system. In both cases, however, reform seems to be very difficult, if not impossible. In science, the well intentioned effort to open up to the public the results of scientific research by the "Open Access" system seems to have backfired, generating a wave of "predatory publishers" favoring an even faster dissipation of scientific potentials by greatly increasing the number of mediocre or bad papers. The financial system seems to be even more impervious to all kind of changes.

In the end, it seems that most systems of this kind can be reformed only by rebuilding them after they have crashed. That's not surprising: after all, you should know that if you fight thermodynamics, thermodynamics always wins.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

History, it is said, doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In particular, the times of the Roman Empire are a remarkable source of events rhyming with those of modern times. For instance, the ancient Romans had developed a number of propaganda technologies which were remarkably similar to the ones we use today. The image above (source), from the Trajan column in Rome, may be seen as accusing Rome's enemies of the time, the Dacians, of preparing for war by building a fortress - perhaps breaking a previously agreed pact. So, let me tell a tale of Roman times. I won't tell you what exactly it rhymes with in our times, but I think it will be easy for you to understand.

The Roman Empire had become rich and powerful on the precious metals, gold and silver, that the Romans mined in Spain. (the details are described here, and here). The problem for the Romans was that gold is a mineral resource and mineral resources don't last forever.

With the first century of our era, the production of gold and silver from the Roman mines started declining and the Empire started showing signs of trouble. The Jewish revolt of 66 CE was one of these signs: it almost destroyed the Empire. Eventually, however, the Romans managed to crush the rebellion and, by sacking Jerusalem, they obtained a nice stash of gold to replenish their badly depleted reserves. But the problem remained: the gold sacked in Jerusalem could not last forever. How to get the gold necessary to pay the legions which ensured the Empire's survival?

At this point, the Romans noticed that a small a kingdom on their North-Western border, Dacia, still had producing gold mines. The Dacians had been building up their production and by the start of the 2nd century CE they could dream of using this gold to their advantage; maybe to create a small empire of theirs.

The situation was clear: the Romans needed gold, the Dacians had it. The Roman had a powerful army, the Dacians a much less powerful one. The consequences were obvious: the Romans invaded Dacia during the early years of the 2nd century CE. It was a risky gamble, because the Dacians put up a stiff resistance, but eventually they were defeated and the Romans took control of their gold mines. With the newly found gold, the Romans tried to conquer their rival empire: Parthia, on their Eastern border. They failed miserably at that. If the gold of Spain had yielded a whole empire to the Romans, the gold of Dacia yielded strictly nothing except Dacia itself. And Dacia was the first border province to be abandoned by the empire less than two centuries after having been conquered. Then, the empire which slowly faded away from history as it was condemned to do.

This is the story. Now, as a little exercise in history-rhyming, let's list its main elements.

A powerful empire plagued by excessive military expenses and by declining mineral resources (Rome)

A short lived boost of resources for the empire (the sack of Jerusalem)

A growing regional power, with still productive mineral resources (Dacia)

A large rival empire (Parthia)

A remarkable capability of using propaganda for military purposes (Rome)

Now, try to fit in this scheme the modern equivalents of the ancient ones. As you can see, history really rhymes a lot. It is not surprising: the way humans behave is determined by the way their brain works. And that has not changed much in the past and - from what we are seeing happening around us nowadays - is not changing at all.

But one more thing that history teaches us is how futile some human efforts are. Think again of the desperate attempt of the Romans to conquer Dacia. They succeeded, but they took a tremendous risk: the campaign was enormously expensive and, had they failed, the result could not have been anything but the disintegration of the empire. And, anyway, the gold of Dacia turned out to be insufficient to keep the empire expanding. The Roman Empire, just like our modern economy, could survive only by growing. Once it couldn't grow any longer, it withered and died.

So, conquering Dacia was a reckless gamble, an enormous cost, and a lot of destruction; and all that just postponed the unavoidable. Will the present world situation evolve in the same way? We can't say for sure, but it is certain that history rhymes a lot.

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted: how the quest for mineral resources is plundering the Planet" (Chelsea Green 2014). His most recent book is "The Seneca Effect" to be published by Springer in mid 2017

Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog is dedicated to exploring the future of humankind, affected by the decline of the availability of natural resources, the climate problem, and the human tendency of mismanaging both. The future doesn't look bright, but it is still possible to do something good if we don't discount the alerts of the modern Cassandras. (and don't forget that the ancient prophetess turned out to be always right).

Above: Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Extracted

A report to the Club of Rome published by Chelsea Green. (click on image for a link)

Rules of the blog

I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it